25 October 2015 1:37 AM

How comical that the Government plans to spend £20billion on a new superpower nuclear missile fleet when it has already sold this country to the Chinese police state.

Who will be frightened by this unusable, overblown Cold War weapon?

Not China, for sure. They already know we are led by gutless worms who won’t defend our independence or our way of life. Last week, in return for some dubious and overstated investments, we handed over the heart of our capital to Peking’s security goons, some of whom allegedly intimidated and photographed British protesters.

They also marshalled a disturbing rentacrowd of Chinese students. These citizens of the People’s Republic wisely obeyed their vigilant embassy’s orders, and held up pro-Peking banners (quite possibly made in prison camps) flown in by the Chinese embassy.

They blocked protesters from view and drowned them out with arrogant drumbeats and blaring loudspeakers – a blatant breach of the regulations of the Royal Parks, where this was going on. The police did nothing at all.

They were busy elsewhere. While Parliament, Premier and Palace prostrated themselves before this despot, a brave few objected to his presence. An alarming but little-shown piece of TV film shows what happened to one of them.

He stood alone, close to the path of the Chinese leader’s procession. In each hand he held up a small placard (making a nonsense of excuses that he might have been hiding a weapon or a bomb). One said: ‘End autocracy.’ The other read: ‘Democracy now.’

The man’s name is Shao Jiang. He witnessed the massacre of pro-democracy demonstrators in Peking’s Tiananmen Square in 1989 so he knows in detail what modern China is really like, as most of us don’t.

Suddenly he was barged by a police officer in a crash helmet, quickly joined by two colleagues, who pushed him backwards at the double, as he feebly protested. I have watched the film at least 50 times and can see no justification for the level of force used. But I can explain it. It looks as if the police were ordered at all costs to ensure that China’s leader did not see or hear any protests.

(Here, at just after 4 minutes 20 seconds (no whingeing, please, about the exact time), is film of what happened to Shao Jiang:

Two Tibetan women, who did no more than try to wave the flag of their stolen country, were also arrested.

All three were held overnight, on suspicion of offences which expert lawyers think are quite absurd, and which look to me as if they were devised to keep them off the streets until the Chinese leader had gone home.

They must wait until Christmas to find out if they will be prosecuted. Worse still, their homes were raided and searched, and some personal possessions removed, just as they would have been in Peking. This, for holding up a couple of placards and a flag? Where are we, exactly?

It looks to me as if David Cameron and President Xi did indeed discuss freedom, law and civil rights in their private meetings. And that China’s despot persuaded Mr Cameron that the Chinese way of dealing with opposition was better than ours.

If I weren’t so ashamed of my sold and submissive country, once so free and so proud of being free, I’d burst out laughing.

At last... Brand admits he's a loser

People who take part in debates (as I often do) tend to claim victory. There’s no scoreboard, so if you have enough nerve, you can usually carry this off whether it’s true or not.

But there’s always one sure sign that you have lost. It’s when you can’t bear to watch a recording of the encounter.

So my thanks to alleged comedian Russell Brand, against whom I recently argued about illegal drugs on BBC’s Newsnight programme.

Mr Brand has tried (and failed) to keep footage of our encounter out of a new film about him, proof as far as I am concerned that he was the loser.

Shameful slur on a Christian hero

The Church of England hasn’t often produced great men in modern times. But I have long believed that George Bell, Bishop of Chichester from 1929 to 1958, was such a man.

Not only was he among the first to see the menace of Hitler, and to aid the Christian opponents of German National Socialism. He also protested against the stupid treatment of German anti-Nazi refugees, rounded up by dimwits in the early months of the Second World War.

He gave up his beautiful palace for the use of others during that war.

Above all, he voiced the Christian conscience of the nation by criticising Churchill’s deliberate bombing of German civilians when it was deeply unpopular to do so. I happen to think he was right, but right or wrong he was acting as he believed Christ, his true Lord and master, would have acted. If he’d kept his mouth shut he would almost certainly have become Archbishop of Canterbury. He died in 1958, leaving no children but a great memory.

So I was aghast to read in several newspapers (two of them supposedly conservative journals of record) that George Bell ‘was’ a child abuser. Not ‘allegedly’ but ‘was’. The Church was also said to have ‘admitted’ or ‘acknowledged’ the dead Bishop’s guilt.

Well, nothing is impossible. But the alleged offence took place more than 60 years ago, and wasn’t alleged until 1995 (when he had been dead for 37 years). One report complained it hadn’t been referred to the police at the time. What were they supposed to do? Exhume him and question his bones?

As usual, we may not know the name or sex of the accuser, though money has been paid to him or her in compensation.

But there has been nothing resembling a trial. No evidence has been tested. No defence has been offered. No witness has been cross-examined. No jury has given a verdict. Yet this allegation is being treated as if it was a conviction. Once again I see the England I grew up in disappearing. What happened to the presumption of innocence and the right to a fair trial before a jury of your peers?

I know the C of E has had real problems with child abuse in recent years, and has a lot of apologising to do. No doubt. But was it wise or right to sacrifice the reputation of George Bell, to try to save its own? Who defended the dead man, in this secret process?

As the prophet Isaiah once remarked: ‘Judgment is turned away backward, and justice standeth afar off: for truth is fallen in the street, and equity cannot enter.’

This is why I continue to believe there is one court of justice where no lies can be told and all secrets are revealed. I’ll leave the final appeal to a higher authority than Lambeth Palace.

We have lots of coal, but won’t use it because fanatics claim it hurts the planet. We demolish expensively built and efficient coal-fired power stations.

Meanwhile, we destroy our steel industry by forcing it to pay huge green taxes also meant to discourage the use of wicked coal. The result of this? More steel is made in China, which is building coal-fired power stations even faster than we are blowing them up.

Oh, and having destroyed our own superb nuclear industry by dogmatically privatising it, we’re paying foreign state enterprises to build nuclear power stations, which will make electricity at prices nobody can afford. And I’m supposed to believe our Government is competent.

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22 October 2015 2:01 PM

Some of you may recall the last time a Chinese President visited this country, during the Blair Dynasty of the New Labour Era. The issue of the police treatment of protestors was much discussed.

I looked out these cuttings from the 1999 visit.

This, from ‘The Scotsman’ of 1st November 1999’, is especially interesting now that the Cameron Dynasty has taken over, but we are still clearly in the New Labour Era:

‘THE Tories last night seized on new evidence suggesting Foreign Office collaboration with Chinese security services to orchestrate the crackdown on human rights demonstrators during the visit of Jiang Zemin.

John Maples, the shadow Foreign Secretary, is to table a series of questions in the Commons asking how closely the Foreign Office worked with the Chinese and the police on deciding tactics to deal with protesters during last month's visit by the Chinese president.

Mr Maples said he believed that Robin Cook, the Foreign Secretary, could have approved plans for the police to adopt a tough line on human rights and pro-Tibetan demonstrators.

He said the leading Chinese dissident, Wei Jingsheng, detained by police during demonstrations close to Buckingham Palace, had alleged that plainclothes Chinese security police had pointed out to British police various Chinese protesters in the crowd.

Yesterday, Foreign Office sources also confirmed that its security adviser in the protocol department, Barry Strevens, a former police Special Branch officer, had worked closely with the Chinese on policing arrangements during the visit.

That included Mr Strevens asking Cambridgeshire police, during President Jiang's visit to the university city, to block off a road with police vans after the Chinese complained that the agreed counter-demonstration plan was not being followed.

"There was very close planning here," Mr Maples said. "It looked to me very organised and very heavy-handed. I can't believe that the Foreign Office did this without ministers' encouragement." The Foreign Office confirmed in a written answer last Thursday that Chinese embassy officials took part in some meetings with the Foreign Office, the police and Buckingham Palace officials to plan for the visit. John Battle, the Foreign Office minister, told Ann Clwyd, the Labour MP for Cynon Valley, these liaison meetings were standard practice before state visits to enable all sides involved to discuss preparations.

But Mr Battle also said the Chinese had been told to expect public demonstrations and that the police would be given a free hand by the Government to decide on the most appropriate policies towards the protests. Foreign Office sources insisted last night that this cooperation was not out of the ordinary, and said that officials were obliged to inform the police of Chinese attitudes towards demonstrators.

"There would have been an outcry if something dreadful had happened and Foreign Office hadn't bothered to liaise with the police. These state visits don't organise themselves," one source said.

"But we also made clear to the Chinese that protests were inevitable and that the policing was a matter for the police. We told the Chinese they would have to put up with whatever happened, although it wasn't put as crudely as that." The senior official denied that Mr Strevens had been directly involved in policing the protests. His role in Cambridge was to provide "practical liaison on the arrangements" already agreed between the police and the Chinese delegation.

But the opposition remains convinced police attitudes were influenced by the clear message that the Chinese hated protests, and that the visit was of great political and economic importance to the Government.

Mr Maples said these suspicions were heightened by the admissions last week by Sir Paul Condon, the Metropolitan police commissioner, that his force's tactics may have been mistaken.

Mr Maples said he now would ask the Foreign Secretary to disclose how many similar meetings took place, and who attended them, to plan a similar state visit by the Hungarian premier recently.

He will also ask whether Chinese police acted as "spotters" for the Metropolitan police’

The ‘Guardian’ of 23rd November 199, noted:

‘During Mr Jiang's last engagement in Cambridge, local police - seen consulting Chinese security officials - moved three vans to block the sight of jeering, placard-waving pro-Tibet demonstrators who greeted him as he arrived outside the university library. But they made no attempt to block the larger number of pro-China supporters.’

The police then looked into the matter, and on 5th March 2000, the Daily Telegraph reported :

‘ROBIN COOK will come under fire this week as a Scotland Yard report blames the Foreign Office for ordering police to crack down on protesters during last autumn's state visit to Britain by the Chinese president.

The report on the affair, which follows protests from Scotland Yard about the Foreign Office's "political interference", will propose strict guidelines on how future state visits should be policed.

Senior officers have confirmed that the Foreign Secretary's officials leaned on the police to provide a heavy presence and specifically asked for demonstrators to be held back from President JiangZemin's convoy.

The motive, say senior Home Office insiders, was not to safeguard Mr Jiang's security, but to spare him being embarrassed by Britons protesting peacefully against his country's record on human rights, democracy and Tibet.

The report, which will be handed to Jack Straw, the Home Secretary this week, will call for future discussions between Mr Cook's officials and the police to be recorded in detailed minutes. It will also propose that guidelines on policing state visits should be openly published.

Public anger flared last October at the way the Metropolitan Police and the Cambridgeshire force acted to prevent demonstrators from being visible to Mr Jiang during his tour.

At the time, Scotland Yard admitted having discussed security beforehand with the Foreign Office. But John Battle, the Foreign Office minister, denied that the police had been given "special instructions".

Later, after questions in Parliament, Mr Battle said that police had met Foreign Office and Chinese officials eight times before the visit when "the concern of the Chinese authorities about the possible impact of demonstrations was discussed".

Scotland Yard even suspected that the demands being relayed to them had originally been dictated by Beijing. During the visit, a Chinese official gave warning that any anti-Jiang demonstrations would "undermine" Sino-British relations. One Home Office insider said yesterday: "The police have insisted that they are never put into this position again. The report reflects their concerns." Although the report will not confirm that the Foreign Office exerted improper pressure on the police, the recommendation that future discussions should be minuted will be seen as confirmation that the "official version" of events was not accepted by the police. Alison Reynolds, director of the Free Tibet Campaign, said she had been shocked by the handling of the visit. "People even had their bags searched for Tibetan flags. It was more reminiscent of China than of Britain." The Free Tibet Campaign is suing the Metropolitan Police. If the action goes ahead as planned, on May 3, Government officials may be questioned in court.

A Foreign Office official denied political interference. He said: "The discussions were no different to the planning meetings held before any state visit." The talks, he said, had been to decide logistics, such as routes and timing, and to ensure security and public safety. The official said Britain was obliged under diplomatic convention to protect "the dignity" of state visitors.’

On 4th May 2000, the ‘Independent’ reported :

‘SCOTLAND YARD admitted yesterday that its officers unlawfully removed banners and flags from demonstrators protesting against last year's state visit by the Chinese President.

The Metropolitan Police also agreed that it would be against the law to use their vans to screen President Jiang Zemin from the protesters, but argued that the tactic had been used to maintain public safety.

The two declarations were made by police in the High Court yesterday after legal action by the Free Tibet Campaign. The organisation claimed the Met had adopted a policy of removing flags from demonstrators lining The Mall, in central London, and of using police vans to block protesters.

An inquiry was carried out into the policing of the visit after widespread complaints that Scotland Yard and Cambridgeshire police had used heavy- handed tactics.

An internal Met investigation found that although the Foreign Office had pressed the police to prevent protesters from disrupting the President's five-day visit the Government had not used improper influence.

In an agreed statement the Met said at the High Court yesterday that "it was unlawful for individual officers to remove banners and flags from people solely on the basis that they were protesting against the Chinese regime on The Mall on 19 October 1999".

A carefully worded additional declaration stated that "it would be unlawful to position police vans in front of protesters if the reason for doing so was to suppress free speech".

But the Met denied vans were used to "mask" demonstrators outside Buckingham Palace and the Chinese embassy. The police contend that the presence of the vehicles was necessary to prevent "a breach of public order".

The police statements were made after the Free Tibet Campaign agreed not to seek permission to launch a judicial review against the Met for its actions. But Alison Reynolds, the campaign's director, insisted yesterday that the Met had followed a policy of removing anti-Chinese material.

Ms Reynolds pointed to the Met's internal review that acknowledged that the police had been told to search spectators for flags and banners "because of the threat to public order and the dignity of Jiang Zemin".

She said: "We took this court case because we believed the police action during the state visit was unacceptable and unlawful. The police have now admitted their methods of policing were illegal. This is a victory for the democratic right to peaceful protest in this country - something sadly lacking in Chinese-occupied Tibet." Assistant Commissioner Ian Johnston said the visit was "a tricky area for our colleagues to deal with and we didn't get it entirely right. We accept absolutely the blame for that." The internal Met report left officers in no doubt that the visit was sensitive. Michael Messenger, overall operational commander, told his officers: "It would be very embarrassing to the Royal Household, HM Government and particularly the MPS [Metropolitan Police Service] if any demonstrator is allowed to confront the Chinese visitors or throw anything towards the visiting party."’

Compare and contrast this story from the ‘Daily Mail’ of 13th November 2003:

‘SCOTLAND Yard has laid down the law to the Americans over the security arrangements for the state visit of George Bush next week.

Senior officers say they will not go out of their way to spare the President ' embarrassment' from antiwar protesters during his three-day trip.

Armed members of the U.S. secret service, who will be accompanying Mr Bush, have been told to adhere to strict rules of engagement on when they can open fire - or risk being prosecuted.

Metropolitan Police chiefs say they will not be intimidated into bringing London to a standstill with unnecessary exclusion zones to protect Mr Bush and insist they, not the Americans, are in charge of security.

During a press briefing at New Scotland Yard yesterday, one of the Met's most senior officers went to extraordinary lengths to insist they had not come under any American pressure.

However, the Daily Mail has learned that there have been disagreements between senior British police and American officials over the level of restrictions on protesters and the number of agents in the President's secret service who are being allowed to carry guns.

Senior police sources describe Mr Bush's trip as 'a nightmare' and said the Americans wanted to turn London into a 'little Washington' by closing roads for miles around, hours before the motorcade passes.

But Deputy Assistant Commissioner Andy Trotter played down suggestions of a row, saying: 'There has been no pressure from anyone else about exclusion zones.

'Our main concern is to make sure that the visit is secure. 'As appropriate we will close roads to facilitate movement of the President's convoy. But we will keep this to a minimum.' Protesters will be barred from walking down Whitehall and into Parliament Square as police enforce the ' Sessional Orders' exclusion zone around Westminster which prohibits marches when Parliament is sitting.

The main demonstration, ending in Trafalgar Square, is due to take place next Thursday after Mr Bush has laid a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior in Westminster Abbey and held talks with Tony Blair in Downing Street.

It is planned that an effigy of the President will be dragged to the ground in Trafalgar Square in a 'rerun' of the toppling of Saddam Hussein's statue in Baghdad near the end of the Iraq war.

Mr Trotter said 5,000 police officers will be involved in the security operation for Mr Bush's visit.

The cost is expected to run into millions.

Police say they will not be heavy-handed with demonstrators so long as they are peaceful and officers have no plans to remove banners as they did during the state visit of the Chinese President Jiang Zemin four years ago.

Mr Trotter said protesters would be allowed to get close to Mr Bush. 'There will be no intention from us to spare anyone's embarrassment and we have come under no pressure from anyone to do this,' he said.

London Mayor Ken Livingstone, an ardent critic of the war, insists that the demonstrators be given as much freedom as possible.’

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19 October 2015 5:14 PM

Beneath a strangely changeable headline (I shall return to that), the Guardian has today confirmed what I have long said. Cannabis possession is no longer treated as a crime in this country, in all but a few exceptional cases.

The article, as published in the paper, is now available on the web only in this form:

The later version, in the paper but no longer on the website says :'Shrinking police budgets have led to a creeping unofficial decriminalisation of cannabis possession as official figures suggest forces are prioritising more serious crimes’ .

says: ‘The number of cannabis possession offences in England and Wales has plummeted since 2011 as forces divert shrinking budgets into tackling more serious crime and officers rein in stop and search.’

For my money, the first headline suits the second story better, and vice versa. And the strange gulps and ‘all perfectly normal’ noises I got when I rang the ‘Guardian’ gave me the strong impression that something had gone wrong.

It’s interesting anyway. I tend to think the ‘unofficial decriminalisation’ is the better explanation’. And claims of ‘prioritising other crime’ or ‘manpower shortages’ or ‘shrinking budgets’ are so much bunkum, which wouldn't be swallowed by anyone who knew any history (a small and shrinking number, but there).

I’ll explain why. The main reason, of course, is that the Police of England and Wales, by comparison with 50 years ago, have far more officers, both in raw numbers and per head of the population. They have been freed of the statutory duty to secure commercial premises (done by private security now), no longer have to enforce parking laws(done by councils) , no longer have to organise prosecutions (the CPS took that over years ago) and they (still) have thousands of non-uniformed back-up staff, obtained in recent years, to cope with a lot of the paperwork which they didn’t have 50 years ago. It seems to me they have also more or less given up the old-fashioned road and motorway patrols, handing this function over to speed cameras, which of course don’t deter drunken, drugged or plain bad driving the way those patrols used to do.

When they don’t do something, it’s because they don’t want to.

If the police want to do something (and I’m sure my more observant readers will have noticed this) then huge resources are available for it, plus noisy processions of high-visibility vehicles, and the police’s private air force of helicopters.

As for why they don’t want to do things, anyone can understand why plodding the streets in the cold and the rain on your own isn’t attractive, compared with a nice warm car or an even warmer desk. Plenty of excuses for that (I’ve heard them all, don’t bother).

In the case of drugs, I suspect the reason is a mixture of two things – the growing number of funky ‘progressive’ police officers and police chiefs, who don’t actually disapprove of drugtaking or believe in the law; and the tiny penalties imposed for cannabis possession when it is prosecuted. Why plunge yourself into months of paperwork and witness duties for a £50 fine that probably won’t get paid? Especially when confiscating an illegal substance is itself a complicated and difficult job, laying officers open to all kinds of risks if they don’t follow the rules to the letter. But deep down, the main reason is that the police have realised the government and the courts (which are heavily influenced by the government through ‘guidelines’; and ‘training’) don’t care about cannabis possession, and don’t want to see offenders brought before them. So they don’t.

A couple of years ago I was more or less howled off the stage for suggesting that the ‘war on drugs’, of which we hear so much, had never actually existed in this country, and that England had covertly and quietly decriminalised cannabis, the main technically illegal drug.

The Guardian’s story is just the next stage in this 45-year saga.

Why was this simple and accurate factual history of real events so unwelcome?

Because bogus claims of a mythical and draconian ‘war on drugs’ were essential to the powerful, influential and wealthy campaign for full drug legalisation, now nearing success in many Western countries. The next step (for them) is the cancellation of the international treaties which still forbid the open commercial sale of cannabis, heroin and cocaine.

These treaties are barely enforced – the US Federal Government does nothing to suppress the open defiance of them by several states in the USA, and the covert defiance of them by this country, which simply doesn’t enforce its own laws, and hasn’t for decades. But for full effect, they want the treaties, and the resulting laws, wholly gone.

Imagine the vast profits to be made in such a legal trade, aided by advertising and the internet.

Imagine the huge taxes which could be raised by increasingly debt-plagued national treasuries. No need to imagine those, see

Essential to this bogus case was the claim that there had been a serious attempt to suppress drug abuse through legal sanctions which was to blame for the mess in which we now find ourselves.

Also essential was the equally bogus claim that this phantasmal ‘war’ had a) failed and b) was ruining the lives of thousands with its brutal penalties.

Although the main source of my facts was a man called Steve Abrams (now alas no longer with us), perhaps the single most effective campaigner for the relaxation of cannabis laws who has ever lived, my book and my attempts to defend it were met with a hailstorm of invective, personal attacks and a sort of verbal spume designed to draw attention away from what I had actually said. None of these attacks questioned my facts, which I thought interesting.

Decriminalisation began in 1969 with the Wootton Report, the 1971 Misuse of Drugs Act which followed most of that report’s recommendations - and was hugely empowered by Lord Hailsham’s 1973 instruction to magistrates to cease jailing offenders for cannabis possession. But it took even clearer shape after the Runciman report, commissioned in 1997 but not delivered until 2000.

Dame Ruth Runciman (like everyone invited by the government to report on this subject, a reliable social liberal) admitted that the supposed penalties against cannabis possession were rarely if ever imposed, though noted that there was too little consistency about this and sought to achieve *more*consistency. Crucially, she also pointed out that, within international conventions, *the Government has great room for manoeuvre in how it applies the law*.

Almost all Western governments, some more slowly than others, have grasped that they can fulfil their obligations by maintaining official illegality, but not in practice enforcing it. On paper, Britain’s regime looks draconian, as drug propagandists are quick to point out. But the maximum penalties prescribed are virtually never applied, or even approached, and most of those who break the law are not even arrested, let alone proceeded against. The one exception among modern law-governed advanced societies is Japan, which still applies a strict law and has much lower cannabis usage. A recent Home Office report suggested these facts were not really connected, and that Japan’s lower drug use resulted from ‘cultural’ factors. Maybe so, but weak laws undermine cultures. Strong laws preserve them. Britain's culture was pretty anti-drug before the long decriminalisation began.

Soon after the publication of the Runciman Report, the Association of Chief Police Officers(ACPO), without consulting Parliament, altered the law of England and began adopting the ‘cannabis warning’ as the preferred response to an arrest for possession. ACPO is now defunct and has been replaced by the National Police Chiefs’ Council, whose spokesman told the ‘Guardian’ ‘Cannabis possession has never been treated as a top priority’.

Let me just repeat that with my emphasis on a single word : ‘Cannabis possession has never been treated as a top priority’. Quite - and after the ‘warning’ has let everyone know the police’s real attitude, the next stage is plainly just to do nothing at all, so it drops out of the statistics altogether, like so many other things that used to be crimes and aren’t (car-theft, bike theft, burglary, vandalism, shoplifting etc) even if we’re still fool enough to think they are.

Well, that’s the truth, and no mistake, and the blethers about concentrating resources on wicked dealers , ‘hard’ drugs ( as if cannabis weren’t hard as nails) etc are ( as I show in my book) just that, blethers. The numbers prosecuted for these offences vary little from year to year, and the penalties are pretty feeble. Users of supposedly more wicked heroin and cocaine get off just as lightly as cannabis users.

It’s nothing to do with cost or manpower. It’s because they don’t want to pursue the matter, because they know the government (while it pretends to be firm and ‘tough’ in public) privately doesn’t want them to. Cannabis, as a former head of the Flying Squad, John O’Connor, said in February 1994 ‘ has been a decriminalised drug for some time now’. Why wouldn’t he have known?

Now, to all those who smeared and mocked my book, how about an apology? I was right. You were wrong. It couldn’t be clearer. But I know you won't say sorry, and I know why not, too.

18 October 2015 2:04 AM

There aren’t enough public sector houses to go round. Would it then make sense to demolish all those houses and make everyone except the rich live in tower blocks?

Of course not. Yet this mad principle – that if everyone cannot have something, nobody can have it – governs our education policy, and no major party disagrees with it.

Half a century ago, everyone agreed that secondary modern schools were not working. Everybody knew that the technical schools, promised in 1944, had not been built.

The one good part of the system was the grammar schools. They were enabling a wonderful revolution in which the very best education was flung open to anyone who could pass an exam, and our obsolete class system was finally being overthrown by unfettered talent.

Alongside them, and based on the same kind of selection by ability, was a brilliant scheme known as the direct grant, by which scores of the finest private day schools in the world took in large numbers of state school pupils free of charge.

Girls and boys from grammar and direct grant schools were storming Oxford and Cambridge by the end of the 1960s, elbowing aside public school products without any special concessions or quotas.

The sane response to this would have been to build the technical schools (which we still badly need), improve the secondary moderns and encourage and expand the grammar schools and the direct grant schools.

The actual response of Tory and Labour governments was to destroy hundreds of superb grammar schools, some of them centuries old, and abolish the direct grant system. You could fill several books with these follies, and I have.

One of the many crazy results was the revival of the dying private schools, which held open their ornate gateways to paying refugees from the comprehensive madness. The comprehensives were so bad and so disorderly that basic competence and order could be sold as top quality for fees of £25,000 a year.

It was a typical example of our governing class’s habit of finding the things that are healthy, good and beneficial, and destroying them.

As it happens, this particular mistake is reversible, and has been corrected in recent times. When communism collapsed in East Germany, thousands of parents petitioned their new free state governments to restore the grammar schools which their Stalinist rulers had ruthlessly replaced with comprehensives.

Comprehensive schools, as too few understand, have never been designed to improve education. On the contrary, their inventor, Graham Savage, actually admitted that his plan would hold back bright children.

They are a revolutionary scheme designed to enforce equality of outcome. That is why it is against the law to open any new grammar schools, and why this week’s odd legal fiddle in Sevenoaks is causing so much fuss.

But a tiny rump of grammar schools continues to exist. They are so much better than the comprehensives which replaced them that even Labour politicians, such as Harriet Harman, have readily endured derision and career damage to send their children to them.

This is why the remaining few grammars are so besieged. Their enemies repeatedly lie about this. Because a tiny few oversubscribed schools are dominated by the middle class, they claim that a national system, available to all, would have the same problem. This obviously isn’t true, yet they keep on repeating the falsehood.

Why can’t we restore the lost grammar schools when huge numbers of parents want them and they are proven to work?

It is time for these lies to end. As things are, state schools are rigidly and cruelly selective, but their pupils are picked on the basis of their parents’ wealth and ability to live in the right catchment area, or their public piety – or both.

The rich and powerful (including many Tory and Labour politicians and some of the keenest campaigners against grammars) play a constant Game Of Homes to lever and wangle their offspring into the best postcodes and the best ‘comprehensives’. Many of these are so socially selective that they have hardly any poor pupils receiving free school meals, though you never hear this fact mentioned.

Why do we put up with it? Why can’t we restore the lost grammar schools when huge numbers of parents want them and they are proven to work?

How dare we laugh at the Germans for being subservient and obedient, when we tolerate this stupid, dishonest policy, which wrecks the hopes of thousands each year and madly wastes the talents of this country?

What's so saintly about destroying a happy family?

It was absurd to deny votes to women for so long. But the fashionable new film Suffragette is deeply misleading about how this came about, and rather nasty. Did Meryl Streep know what she was doing when she lent her stardom to this production?

It makes a saint out of a (fictional) working-class woman, played by Carey Mulligan, who ruthlessly destroys her small, happy family for the sake of an abstraction, ignoring the pleas and kindly advice of good men.

And it makes a heroine out of another fanatic, played by Helena Bonham Carter, who is in fact a terrorist, and helps to blow up a Cabinet Minister’s home.

I hope the makers are not prosecuted under the absurd and unBritish 2006 Terrorism Act, which created the offence of ‘Glorifying Terrorism’, though some may think that is what their film does.

There is quite a lot of evidence that the militant suffragettes actually damaged the cause they so noisily pursued. The film doesn’t even mention the First World War, which did far more to bring about votes for women than hunger strikes, broken windows or arson.

David Cameron’s twin bungles in Libya and Syria, where his ignorant interference helped cause the huge migrant wave, have transformed the EU referendum campaign.

Cameron's pro-EU argument has been so weakened by the migrant crisis that a vote to leave Europe may now acually be possible

He has been doubly unlucky. First, he unexpectedly won the Election with a majority, so he has to keep his promise of a vote. Second, a largely indifferent public has spotted the connection between EU membership and our undefended borders.

This means that a vote to leave is actually possible, which I must admit I hadn’t thought it was. The pro-EU argument has always been feeble and dishonest, as the comically useless launch of the ‘Stay-in’ campaign last week showed. And the Prime Minister’s ‘renegotiations’ were always hopeless. But now this is becoming painfully obvious to those who would normally not have cared.

I just hope that, if we do decide to leave, we have enough strength and wealth to act as a nation once again. Our national muscles have shrivelled and wasted in the 43 years since Westminster was turned into a glorified county council.

And we still have no major political party that supports national independence. So will we know what to do with it when we get it?

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15 October 2015 11:18 AM

Who on earth would oppose votes for women now? Not I, for one, and I like to think I’d have been against the denial of votes on the grounds of sex had I been alive and able to express an opinion 110 years ago. In fact, the formal exclusion of women from the vote in Britain was quite modern and like many bad things, achieved by reformers. It was part of the 1832 Great Reform Act, generally viewed as an unmixed blessing by modish opinion (the Act, as well as taking the votes from some women householders also disenfranchised quite a few industrial areas, according to the interesting account of it in Robert Tombs’s ‘The English and their History’).

But I wasn’t very impressed by the new film ‘The Suffragettes’, launched this week amid warm waves of praise. The good things about it seem to me to have been things the makers didn’t intend to be good. We are, I think, supposed to admire the guts and determination of the (fictional) working-class suffragette from the Bethnal Green laundry, who throws herself into the fight, incidentally destroying her family as a result ; and that of the bomb-making pharmacist, and would-be woman doctor (said to be based on a real person, though I’ve been unable to find full details) , played by Helena Bonham Carter; and of the Suffrage martyr Emily Wilding Davison, who died (very probably by accident – she bought a return ticket to Epsom) beneath the hooves of the King’s horse at the Derby.

I found myself more taken with the men who tried in various ways to persuade women known to them to stay away from dangerous and tragic fanaticism, which almost always (I should know, as an ex-fanatic) eats the souls of those who engage in it. The film doesn’t really address the argument always made in my schooldays, that the suffragettes, with their violence, arson and vandalism, alienated more people than they inspired, and that it was the conscription of women into the workforce in 1914 that actually led to the social revolution we then had, including votes for (some) women.

It was an interesting campaign, quirkier and more paradoxical than many now recognise. Quite a lot of women were against the suffragettes, and there’s a strong suspicion that the Liberal Party feared that women voters would tend to be Tories (women in those days were famous for their conservatism) and so did their best to postpone the matter. Republican France, it is interesting to note, didn’t give women the vote till 1944.

But I’ve always been struck by this most effective poster favouring women’s suffrage from the pre-1914 era

I can’t find a bigger or clearer representation of it, but the message is clear. It is absurd that educated, wise, hardworking or dutiful persons should not have the vote. By implication (though this is not explored) it is strange and perhaps wrong that convicted criminals, and various other categories of subject should keep it. Today we should be (rightly) unhappy with such terms as ‘lunatic’ or ‘unfit for service’ , and many nowadays regard habitual drunkenness as a blameless disease (I do not take this view). But if we are honest, most people would have some doubts about the continued granting of votes to those whose behaviour has been or is criminal, or otherwise damaging and marked by habitual irresponsibility and rashness. That impeccable liberal, David Cameron, is (for instance) almost obsessed with his noisy desire to keep votes away from serving prisoners. Whether he really cares about this, I do not know. But he is not ashamed to appear to care.

We are still allowed to agree with the top half of the poster. But thinking about the bottom half is more difficult. The idea that suffrage must and should at all times be universal is now an unquestioned (and unquestionable) pillar of modern secular faith. The absolute belief in the absolute virtue of the masses has already achieved a threefold victory in this country since 1948 – the abolition of the quirky University seats in parliament, which were often occupied by distinguished and exceptional individuals who would have been hard put to enter Parliament any other way, the abolition of Aldermen in local government, whose experience and wisdom is in my view still much missed, and the destruction of the House of Lords as it was (though there is yet to be a satisfactory or even half-way useful replacement). This rejection of the hereditary title to office, whose supporters feel no need to argue a case they think is self-evident, implicitly menaces the monarchy. Everyone is too polite to mention it while the present Queen is still among us, but what will happen when she is not?

This unanimity means that universal suffrage (or the abolition of unelected chambers such as the Lords and the US Senate used to be) cannot possibly be reconsidered or withdrawn. Those who doubt the absolute wisdom of the people have to concede the universal suffrage principle. Only then can they come up with ideas I’ve discussed before, giving extra votes to some citizens (such as Nevil Shute’s scheme for additional votes, granted for achievement, life experience, skill at work, successful raising of children, or other distinction, explained in his novel ‘In the Wet’).

I just think that if you ponder the sheer wrongness of denying Votes for Women, because they are women (a wrongness which is self-evident, because it is irrational) you have in all honesty to think about whether Equal Votes for Everybody is a particularly sensible idea, and if so why. It doesn’t seem especially rational to me. Do we apply the same principle to anything else? I can’t offhand think of any other example, but perhaps I am not trying hard enough.

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It is being incorrectly stated by many media that a new grammar school is to open in Kent. That would be illegal, and the ‘new school’ is only allowed in the form of an ‘annexe’ to an existing school. In most of the United Kingdom, where academically selective secondary schools were vandalised and destroyed by egalitarian fanatics 40 or 50 years ago, this dodge is impossible. There is nothing to which to ‘annexe’. In any case, David Cameron and Nick Morgan (both privately educated) are themselves opposed to academic selection. Mr Cameron himself (like many influential left-wingers who use exceptional and anomalous parts of the state system to preserve their political image) has managed to get his child into a wholly untypical and highly selective single-sex London secondary school, of a sort wholly unavailable to 90% of the population.

For a full explanation of the ‘selection by ability versus selection by wealth or public piety’ argument, please go to page 167 of this excellent Civitas pamphlet, where I ask 'Why is Selection by Wealth better than Selection by Ability?' and demonstrate that (though selection by wealth and public piety is the preferred policy of our elite) it is not better.

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14 October 2015 4:41 PM

Some weeks ago I posted an interview of me by Owen Jones of 'The Guardian'. I said at the time it was a pity that the whole thing couldn't have been shown. To my amazement, lots of other people then started asking for the uncut version. Owen (and I know this has caused him and his colleagues some effort, for which they deserve thanks ) generously agreed to do so. Here is the full version.

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12 October 2015 12:36 PM

Experts seem to have vanished from British foreign policy. They gave unwanted advice before the Iraq war (they were against it) and so were sidelined in favour of political commissars, spin doctors and politicised ‘intelligence services’, whose huge unquestioned budgets are a reward for their loyalty to the government of the day and their willingness to sustain its claims and feed its fantasies. This is easy for them since they don’t ever have to give public accounts of what they allegedly know, and can fend off all inquiries by claiming to have prevented all kinds of horrible attacks which would otherwise have taken place, claims that can never be tested. My own instinct is to mistrust them because they are both self-serving and secretive.

On Saturday, in a brief flash of knowledge and understanding, the BBC allowed an actual expert on Syria on to a major programme . I am not sure they bargained for what they got, a few brief minutes on concreted, well-informed scorn for the policy the BBC has itself been actively promoting through the nature of its coverage since the Syrian crisis began, thoughtless, emotive, utopian and one-sided from the start. Some of you may recall my appalled response to this coverage at the time, which seemed to me to be playing with fire. I didn’t know the half of it.

This expert is Peter Ford, once Her Britannic Majesty’s Ambassador to Syria ( a job not handed out to just anybody), genuinely knowledgeable about that country and the Middle East, and so utterly opposed to the British government’s current ridiculous policy.

He argued that the choice is quite simple, between Assad or the deluge. He said Russia’s policy was quite reasonable, wondered out loud (as I do) why the Labour Party does not make more of this very considerable British foreign policy failure . He described the Western powers as having ‘impaled themselves’ on their policy of calling for the downfall of President Assad. He argued ( and this I had not heard before) that Western sanctions on Syria, by creating more misery there, were also causing people to flee destitution and become refugees.

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Peter Ford’s interview can be found in full 1 hours 35 minutes into Saturday’s Radio 4 Today programme, here:

Justin Webb does actually ask him a question beginning ‘Are you seriously expecting…?’ Questions couched in this form , especially directed by generalists against experienced veteran diplomats who know more about the subject than the questioner, really are a breach of impartiality.

By the way, the phrase ‘barrel bomb’, a phrase always enunciated in tones of horror, as if there is something intrinsically macabre about barrels, creeps into this exchange, as it crept into a recent statement on the subject by President Obama. Readers here will know that I am not an enthusiast for dropping explosives or incendiaries on populated areas. Indeed, I am loathed and despised by many for my condemnation of the deliberate bombing of German civilians in their homes by this country’s political and military leaders in World War Two (not just Dresden , the whole lot).

So I am not in any way a defender of ‘barrel bombs’, any more than I am a defender of the NATO bombing of Belgrade, in which civilians inevitably died, or the Anglo-French bombing of Libya, in which civilians inevitably died, or of the Israeli attacks on Gaza, in which civilians inevitably died. If you don’t like atrocities, don’t start wars. It’s a simple rule, and one I hope to make popular in time.

But, while all such bombs are axiomatically horrible, I cannot see what is so *exceptionally* horrible about ‘barrel bombs’ , which are simply crude improvised unguided bombs. In what way are they more barbaric than supposedly guided bombs, whose alleged accuracy is greatly over-rated. Is it nicer to die or be maimed by more sophisticated, more accurate bombing? To ask the question is to demonstrate the absurdity of such distinctions. High explosive, splinters, incendiary chemicals tear and burn the human body just as terribly whether they are 'sophisticated' or crude. Accuracy in aerial bombing is a pernicious self-serving myth. Anyone who catches himself using the mendacious term 'surgical strike' should afterwards be ashamed.

By the way, I also note the absence of outrage over the current Saudi air attacks on Yemen. In what way are these attacks morally superior to Assad’s barrel bombing of rebel areas in Syria?

If you or I were being bombed from the air in our homes how much would we care about the shape of the bomb? Also, if we are so exercised about barrel bombs, when did you last hear through any British or US medium that ‘our’ ‘democratic’ Iraqi President, Nouri al Maliki, had used these weapons in populated areas against Sunni militants in Fallujah in 2014?

My own guess is that this stuff about barrel bombs is a result of the failure to establish that Assad had used chemical weapons, and his subsequent decision to dismantle and abandon his chemical munitions. Supporters of continuing efforts to overthrow Assad at all costs speak and write as if the case had been proved, but in fact it never was, and alternative theories have been put forward (also unproven) by the American journalist Seymour Hersh. So I advise care, and intelligent curiosity, when you hear or read the phrase.

11 October 2015 1:43 AM

The really big political changes in this country take place inside the major parties, not at general elections. Think of the Heseltine putsch against Mrs Thatcher, or the cruel overthrow of Iain Duncan Smith, or the recent desperate recapture of the Labour Party (whatever next?) by socialists.

And last week the Tory Party finally transformed itself into New Labour.

There are a few finishing touches to be added between now and 2020. But after much writhing and struggling, the chrysalis finally burst open to reveal the Heir to Blairism, glistening with snake oil and hair oil and surrounded by trilling choirs of happy billionaires, just as in the old days of Lord Cashpoint and bombing Iraq.

The process will only be complete when Lord Mandelson himself accepts that his life’s work is now being done by David Cameron and George Osborne, who is even starting to look like the Blair era’s Sinister Minister. Perhaps it’s time for a moustache.

The Tories also yearn for the open endorsement of Alan Milburn, whom they already employ as Commissar for Equality.

For the moment, they will have to content themselves with the embrace of Lord Adonis, more Blairite than Blair, who is in charge of concreting over what remains of the English countryside, a long-term New Labour obsession.

Privately, they are on good terms with the Blair creature himself, whose advice is always welcome in Downing Street. He is known there as ‘The Master’ and, with a few very minor changes (mainly the replacement of the word ‘Conservative’ with ‘New Labour’), he could have delivered the Prime Minister’s Manchester speech on Wednesday.

Who said (I have removed any mention of the party name): ‘It wasn’t just me who put social justice, equality for gay people, tackling climate change, and helping the world’s poorest at the centre of our mission – we all did’?

Honestly, could you tell? Where now are all those who thought David Cameron would unleash his inner Tory when freed from the embrace of Nick Clegg? Mr Cameron doesn’t have an inner Tory, and Wednesday’s performance suggests that Mr Clegg is actually the more conservative of the two.

Even the slightly embarrassing off-colour joke about sex, astonishing in the mouth of a serious politician, was the sort of thing that Mr Blair likes to do, along with the mention of ‘the kids’, the tinny business-school English, and the use of terrorism as an excuse for dubious actions.

Though I doubt whether Mr Blair would have had the nerve to make the deeply dishonest misrepresentation of Jeremy Corbyn’s perfectly reasonable and civilised objections to the extrajudicial killing of Osama Bin Laden.

The false and cheap suggestion that Mr Corbyn does not regard the events of September 11, 2001 as a tragedy – when he specifically said that he did – was a disgrace for which Mr Cameron should quickly make amends.

This is the thing that is most wrong with Blairism – its instinct is to lie. It is at bottom a nasty mix of greed, Leninist party discipline, advertising slickness and ruthless, intolerant political correctness. It attracts and promotes power-worshippers.

To survive and prosper, it must always pretend to be something else.

And as long as it succeeds in doing so, we are stuck with it.

Finally, a movie that's right to use the awful F-word

I don't generally approve of the F-word, but I must admit that the opening scene of the new film The Martian, about a US astronaut stranded on the red planet, provides a rare example of the wholly justified use of this powerful expletive.

Even I might be tempted to mutter it, under the circumstances. There are many interesting things about this drama, one of them being that we never see the marooned spaceman’s family, whose powerless pain would normally feature largely in such a story.

But perhaps the most fascinating of all is its oozy, flattering attitude towards China, shown as a noble ally and as a highly advanced country, with no attention paid to its repressive, nasty features.

It’s all rather different to the way the equally despotic Soviet Union used to be dealt with in the movies, when it was America’s chief rival.

For those who think that Jeremy Corbyn is a threat to national security, how about this fellow, who appeared before the Labour conference in military uniform, denouncing the upper classes of every nation as ‘selfish, depraved, dissolute and decadent’, and promising they would be dealt with shortly by the coming ‘socialist revolution’ (by which he meant the arrival of Russian tanks).

It was the 1945 Labour conference. And it was Denis Healey, who died last weekend, full of years and honour, having been one of the best Defence Secretaries in modern times, and a reasonably competent Chancellor. Healey was in fact a terrible old Stalinist, an actual member of the Communist Party in the worst gulag days, who may just possibly have stayed sympathetic to Moscow for rather longer than he later admitted.

Yet when it came to it, he showed undoubted courage on the field of battle in his country’s service, and later proved a wise and competent Minister, ending his life fiercely opposed to the succession of stupid wars into which lesser men dragged us.

Proper countries are full of awkward, discontented people who may in fact turn out to be better patriots than the more obvious and noisy flag-wavers. Bear it in mind.

Is there a worse thing than having your child wrongfully snatched away from you by the State, which cannot be bothered to wait to see if charges against you are proven? Are we truly free if such a thing can be done, irrevocably?

The case of Karrissa Cox and Richard Carter is a grotesque injustice. No court should have been able to hand over their child for adoption until the charges of abuse against them had been heard and proved beyond reasonable doubt. In fact, the charges collapsed.

The presumption of innocence is all that stands between us and tyranny, and I hope that some wise judge acts swiftly to restore the lost child to its parents. This isn’t a free country if this doesn’t happen.

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